Tag: costs

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free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Detonators in Place

rent control, good intentions, government regulations

You must place explosives a certain way when demolishing a building to avoid damaging surrounding structures. But if you just want to destroy, you can forget about such precautions.

Could this be the perspective of those demanding national rent control?

They forget — or ignore — the destruction of living space inflicted by incentive-​incinerating rent controls in places like New York City and Santa Monica.

Rick Moran perceives that President Biden is making a “first move toward a radical national rent control law,” telling agencies to find ways to stop rent increases. Biden is doing so at the behest of 50 congressional communists who have implored him to take executive action to save tenants from rising rents.

According to their letter, “rent is too high and millions of people across this country are struggling to stay stably housed as a result.” Meanwhile, landlords are “increasing the rent for their own profit …”

Profit? In a market economy? 

Rising rents! Caused by … ?

But if you just want to “solve the problem” and have been trained to be heedless of the destruction regulation can cause, you needn’t think about cause and effect — who did what and how and why. In the interventionist mentality, when oil or food or housing prices zoom upwards, only one cause is possible, and it has nothing to do with politics and policies already in place.

Even if the government’s central banks have been zanily pumping up the supply of money and credit while city and state bureaus have been going all-​out to hamper and halt production.

That single cause, they contend, can only be the grasping, grabbing, profit-​seeking capitalists. You know. The bums who make their riches (when they do) by supplying us with what we need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Finns Fail at Fix

Bernie Sanders, Finland, health care, socialism, single payer, costs, spending

Finland’s government-​run health care system is a mess. 

This normally wouldn’t faze me much. I have to navigate our American mess, er, system. But Finland’s medical service delivery system is relevant to Americans — as is Denmark’s and Norway’s and Sweden’s — because the current crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls tout these “Scandinavian socialist” programs as models to follow.

Yet Finland’s program is in crisis.

How bad is it?

Bad enough for Finland’s government to fold early, before an election, with Prime Minister Juha Sipilä throwing in the towel earlier this month. He had been struggling “to get social and health-​care reforms that he made the cornerstone of his government’s four-​year term through parliament,” The Wall Street Journal informs us. Finland’s health care system is somewhat decentralized, and that quality of service varies district by district. Silipä had been trying to centralize administration while also allowing for some privatization.

Left-​leaning parties have balked at this, hence the impasse.

So, what is the lesson? A medical delivery system should be anti-fragile, capable of functioning despite incompetents or corrupt officials in government, despite voting blocs at loggerheads. A vast segment of the service industry should not be held in hock to the political machinations of special-​interest groups.

Behind all of it, though, is the looming demographic crisis: the population of Finland, like here in America and throughout the First World, is aging. This puts heavy stressors on welfare-​state systems run on a Ponzi-​like re-​distributive basis.* Of course costs will increase and service levels will fall, given how it’s all set up.

But once in place, government-​run medical systems do not heal themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* An endemic problem for socialists, which they try to ignore. See “Finland: Government Collapses Over Universal Health Care Costs, #Bernie2020 Hardest Hit.”

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Bernie Sanders, Finland, health care, socialism, single payer, costs, spending

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

DumpCare

healthcare, Trumpcare, Obamacare, medicine, costs, regulations, Medicaid, single payer

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan insists that his “TrumpCare” plan to replace ObamaCare will decrease medical insurance rates. Others argue that his American Health Care Act will increase those rates. Likewise, he expects it to reduce strain on federal budgets; others deny this outright. The “coverage” issue is just as contentious.

TrumpCare is a mess because it is isn’t “DumpCare.” What’s needed is not yet another regulation-​plus-​subsidy system. We need repeal and then … more repeals.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has never really been on board with this. He has promised that no one would lose “coverage,” assuming that “coverage” is “health care.”

It is not. State charity programs like Medicaid (upon which ObamaCare relied way too much) are merely ways to pay for services. Dumping a gimcrack payment system is not the same as decreasing medical services. “DumpCare” wouldn’t dump care, only insane government.

For example, we know that health care outcomes for poor folks without Medicaid turn out to be better than poor folks with Medicaid.* Increasing the number of people on formalized subsidy programs is no panacea.

Besides, ObamaCare severely under-​delivered on “coverage.”

New programs, nevertheless, are traps, regardless of demerit: once you provide a benefit, folks come to rely on it and demand more — objecting when it’s taken away. Which is why few programs are ever repealed, despite failing to meet original expectations.

So far, the “small government party” hasn’t found the courage to actually limit government. Do Republicans really believe what they say, that fewer regulations and subsidies will lead to lower costs and better service?

It seems Republicans won’t take their own prescription.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid “natural experiment” provides reasons to question the merits of the program. As the initial, randomized, controlled study found, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services.…”

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Accountability education and schooling free trade & free markets national politics & policies responsibility

The Leading Edge of Higher Ed

apprentice, Praxis, education, training, skills, college, costs

“People are paying tons of money to be kept out of the real world … being taught by people most of whom have never even worked in the business world. It’s kinda crazy.”

Well, yeah. There’s a lot of crazy in modern college life.

Which is one reason to work around it. That’s what Isaac Morehouse — quoted above — has done.

Morehouse is the founder of Praxis. You may have heard him on The Tom Woods Show or seen him interviewed on Fox News. “The mindset of ‘obey the rules, follow procedures, chase credentials, chase grades, and wait to be told what to do and you’ll be handed this magical ticket to a job,’” Morehouse told Fox’s Tucker Carlson, “it’s just not true.”

His alternative is simple: leverage the apprenticeship idea, combine it with counseling and instruction, and arrange with participating companies a guaranteed job at program’s end.

Our college system deserves a failing grade. Colleges sponge away fortunes (often borrowed) from students, while neglecting to train them to do much of anything but … college work.

This means not only that college grads have trouble finding work, but, as Mr. Morehouse discovered before he hit upon the Praxis idea, there are many, many companies trying to hire competent workers, but unable to find them.

A market opportunity!! Praxis unites demand and supply, connecting companies needing smart, energetic, cooperative workers with willing, eager young folks seeking meaningful (and well-​paid) employment.

You can find a good overview of his effort — and a way to sign up! — at discoverpraxis​.com.

Praxis’s testimonials are inspiring.

As the future should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

War Costs Ever Mount

War has costs … and prices. The costs include everything we give up to wage it, and everything taken away by the violence: lives, property, and (sometimes) sacred honor. The prices include the monetary expenditures that keep on adding up.

A recent Associated Press story warns us that the “Costs of Wars Linger for Over 100 Years.” The U.S. government is still paying for World War I, costing taxpayers $20 million per year. Spending on veterans of World War II peaked in 1991, while the Vietnam conflict still soaks up taxpayer dollars:

A congressional analysis estimated the cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the post-​war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some $270 billion since 1970.…

We can expect the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to take money for scores of years after the cessation of fighting — and let’s hope it does cease, some day.

How long can we continue to pay? Very:

There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-​American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee — each for $876 per year.

This may seem idiotic, but it’s inevitable.

One element of the story, not mentioned in the reportage, is something I hear from friends: The Veterans Administration more than accommodates increasing its rolls not merely of the recent wounded, but from ancient veterans who received no war wounds. It’s part of the natural expansion of bureaucracy.

The price of war just goes on and on, and up and up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Costs of a Good Cause

Costs are what we give up for what we want. Focus only on a transaction, and that McChicken sandwich “costs” only a bit over a buck. But ultimately that McChicken costs you what you give up in your budget because you purchased it: a candy bar, a chocolate milk, or a tune on iTunes.

Nearly everything has costs, often hidden. 

Take Michele Obama’s anti-​obesity campaign. The Hunger-​Free Kids Act, the legislative kicker of the First Lady’s cause, withholds money from schools that don’t provide a rigorous well-​balanced menu. Kids must take a variety of fruits and veggies with each meal. Must!

The regulation will cost local school districts about $7 billion to comply. Cash-​strapped school districts. It will also cost quite a lot in thrown-​away food, as kids are “required” to take food they don’t intend to eat.

And then there’s the cost in reduced nutrition. 

It appears that kids like flavored milk products. You know, chocolate milk, strawberry-​flavored milk, etc. But high fructose corn syrup (which was foisted on our population by the federal government in the first place, via huge subsidies to corn farmers in general and Archer Daniels Midland in particular) is now a no-​no. Flavored milks are on the way out. 

The cost of cutting them?

Well, kids get 70 percent of their milk from flavored milks. Take away their chocolate, and … the result, for many, will be no milk at all.

That’s how a pro-​nutrition regulation can end up reducing nutrition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.